The present disclosure relates to electronic devices and, more particularly, to user interfaces for portable electronic devices.
Portable electronic devices are rapidly evolving to include many types of wearable technologies. Advances in miniaturization and low-power display, processor, and wireless communication technologies have enabled smart watches, head-mounted display devices, and other wearable electronic devices to provide functionality that was once constrained to larger format transportable smart phones and tablet computers. For example, Google Glass is a wearable device having an optical head-mounted display and enables wearers to access the Internet and operate applications using natural language voice commands. Some smart watches can similarly allow user operation by natural language voice commands.
To activate Glass, wearers can tilt their heads a defined angle upward (which can be altered for preference) or tap the touchpad, and say “O.K., Glass.” Once Glass is activated, wearers can say an action, such as “Take a picture”, “Record a video”, “Give me directions to . . . ”, “Google' . . . ”, or “Send a message to . . . ”. Search results and other responses can be read back to the wearer through a voice response relayed using bone conduction through a transducer that sits beside the ear, thereby rendering the sound almost inaudible to other people.
Although Glass' bone conduction transducer technology or headphones can make audio feedback to a wearer difficult for other persons to overhear, the wearer's voice commands to Glass, smart watches, and other portable electronic devices may be easily overheard by other persons. Privacy of such communications is therefore limited when operated in a public setting.
The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.